Teaching a computer to sing: integrating computing and music in a middle school, after-school program

This paper reports on an after-school program that introduced middle school students to computing through music. The program ran for two years, from October 2015 through April 2017. It involved singing, encoding music with ABC notation, and program-ming music with Pencil Code. We describe the program's goals and the activities students pursued, as well as suggestions for improvement. While rigorous evaluation of such a program is difficult, we present survey and focus group results that show that students' attitudes toward the program were positive and that they did learn some programming.